Beginner Tips

Newsstand lets you subscribe to your favorite magazines and periodicals right from your iPhone and iPad, no paper copies required. When new issues are available, they're delivered right to Newsstand in digital format. In most cases you pay for Newsstand subscriptions just as you would a physical magazine subscription. However, managing and canceling Newsstand subscriptions is much easier than canceling physical ones!

Your Apple ID is what you use to make purchases in iTunes and to link your iPhone and iPad to your iCloud account. If you buy Apple products online, you also associate those purchases with your Apple ID. If you change email addresses or don't have access to the email currently tied to your Apple ID, you can easily change it.

The Calendar app for iPhone and iPad provides a great way to keep track of all your appointments and events. While it's faster to use Siri to create basic events, if you need more precise control, or if you want to edit existing event details, you can also do it the old fashioned way -- by tapping your way through options inside the Calendar app itself.

The iPhone and iPad both have a built-in Camera app that not only lets you capture photos, but also does a surprisingly good job at recording video as well. With the Photos app you can even trim and share your videos right from your iPhone or iPad, no computer necessary!

By default your iPhone uses two quick vibration pulses for a text message and a continuous steady pulse vibration for incoming calls. All other Notification Center alerts receive a single vibration. But what if you want something different so you can easily tell what kind of notification you're receiving without even looking at your iPhone? As it happens, you can do just that by creating and assigning your own vibration patterns. Here's how:

For most of us, cellular data through our carrier is limited. Whether you're traveling internationally or you're about to hit your data cap for the month, turning off cellular data completely lets you rest assured you won't be hit with overage charges. Here's how:

Tired of typing out long words, names, email addresses, web addresses, or entire sentences over and over again? Well then, save yourself some time and effort and set up iOS keyboard shortcuts for any and all of the text you type regularly. By default, the iPhone and iPad ship with "omw" as a shortcut for "On my way!" but you can create and customize any shortcut you want. What's more, thanks to iCloud, any shortcut you create will automagically sync between your iPhone, iPad, and/or Mac. Here's how!

Favorites serves two great purposes. One is that it acts as a holding place for all your favorite articles, allowing you to jump back to them any time you'd like. It also automatically saves them for offline reading, meaning you won't need an internet connection to read any articles you favorite. Don't have time to read a whole article now? Favorite it and jump back in whenever you'd like to finish, with or without an internet connection.

If you have an iPhone or iPad, you've got Game Center. Once you log in, you're ready to start playing games with other opponents. You can share your Game Center ID with others and receive invites to become friends. From there you can view each other's achievements and challenge each other to games. If you aren't sure how to accept a Game Center friend request, here's how.

If you're writing an email on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad and you don't have time to finish, or you're simply not sure you're ready to send it yet, you can always save it as a draft and come back to it later. However, it can take a lot of hunting actually find that draft and get back to it! Luckily, iOS contains a gesture shortcut that can make tracking down all your draft emails a lot faster.